If I had a dollar for every time I’ve been asked when is the best time to tweet, I probably wouldn’t have to work so hard. Determining when your followers are on-line and most likely to see your tweets has always been a challenge. You can assume that many of your followers will be on-line during business hours the most – but in reality that theory really only applies for b2b. If your main consumers are the every-day-joe, this might not apply.

We recently ran across two apps for measuring when the most likely time is for your tweets to be seen. I tested them with my accounts and was quite surprised by some of the results. Some of the results went against my theories totally.

The result that astounded me the most was that my tweets receive the most replies and retweets on Fridays. Can you believe that – the one day of the week no one is really thinking about work. I guess that’s my answer – people are waiting for the day to end to get away from the office for the weekend and are visiting their social sites more so as not to work. Yup – got it now! When you think about it that way it makes sense.

Anyway, I tried both apps I found. First is www.tweriod.com. This one is pretty simple giving me my best hours to tweet between 8 and 9 am, 10 and 11am and 1 and 2 pm on weekdays. There were best times for Sundays, Weekends and Monday as well – which amazingly enough changed the time frame.

The second app is http://www.socialbro.com Now this one is much more in-depth. It not only tells you when your best times to tweet are, it measures your influence, activity, trust factor and will even let you analyze your competition’s account in comparison to your own. Quite a powerful tool. But getting back to when to tweet. The analysis SocialBro offers is much more in-depth. Here’s a screen shot showing part of the report. I think I’ll be using this app for a while.

It’s one thing to use social media for your business, but measuring the results is another. Thankfully there are more and more developers out there coming up with apps to allow us to understand just what people do with the information we post and how it affects our bottom line. The only problem with this is – one could spend more time in a day finding and setting up new apps than working….